Subscribe by EmailPorn at Work? Hacking!
May 11, 2009 by Casey | 2 commentsBy Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
According to an Ohio Court of Appeals, uploading nude photographs of yourself using your work computer is indeed felony hacking – because it may constitute “unauthorized access” to that computer, or rather, with respect to an amendment to the law, “exceeding the scope of authorization to access a computer.” The amendment was designed to deal with things like accessing parts of an employer’s network that you shouldn’t be authorized to access, even if it doesn’t involve hacking into the system.
However, a jury in the Ohio case, as well as the appeals court, found that the law also applied to a man who joined Adult Friend Finder, uploaded and viewed pornographic photos, and solicited the services of a dominatrix – all from his office computer. The man was convicted on three counts: unauthorized access to a computer, theft of services in office (since he was using the computer for personal business on the company’s time), and solicitation of prostitution. The first two are felonies, the third a misdemeanor. He was originally sentenced to 15 months in jail, but this was reduced to two and a half years in “community control” (which could mean anything from therapy to community service to electronic tagging).
Threat Level quoted a former computer crimes prosecutor as stating:
This goes to the whole concept . . . that violation of an internal policy on the use of a computer can be piggybacked to make a crime. His uploading of nude pictures is certainly inappropriate and something he could be terminated for, but it was perfectly legal. When you use the heavy hand of the criminal law to prosecute inappropriate behavior, it’s just an abuse of the criminal statutes.
Of course, this use of anti-hacking laws brings to mind another case. Prosecutors have asked that Lori Drew be sentenced to three years in prison for her violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; recall that this conviction rose from a case of cyber-bullying, based on her violation of the MySpace Terms of Service (another case of “unauthorized access”).
[Image Source: flickr]
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And the abuse could continue. How long before someone decides to ‘pile on’ one more offense? If the dominatrix’ that he was contacting were being paid, rather than doing it as a casual partner, how likely that someone would prosecute them for violation of the RICO statute (U.S.)?
I think we’ve reached a point where there are simply too many lawyers, all looking for an excuse to litigate something, anything, in order to generate work, hence income, and show their supposed ‘need.’
I agree about the potential for abuse, but to be fair, I don’t think that lawyers are entirely to blame. In a case like the one above, it seems far more likely that the company brought the problem to their lawyers than that any lawyer sought it out. Much of the image of the plaintiff lawyers who run around beefing up huge settlements for nothing is media-hyped myth – not that it doesn’t exist, just not on the scale that we think it does because of the stories we read in the news.
Of course, if you want to lump in “the law” with lawyers in general, then I agree. :) I think that the biggest problem is that laws are written too slowly to account for shifting technology and cultural norms.